Young Adults’ Use of Debt and Credit During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Open Access DepositedDuring recessions, young adults may experience greater challenges getting back on their feet, and there is a risk that existing community-level racial inequities in credit health could widen. This dissertation study draws on longitudinal consumer credit records from over 850,000 adults ages 20 to 29 to provide an in-depth, descriptive, quantitative picture of the credit health trajectories of young adults during the COVID-19 pandemic between February 2020 and August 2023. In this study, I find that while young adults’ credit health improves in the immediate wake of the pandemic, there are signs of financial distress in 2022 and 2023, along with signs of deepening community-level racial inequities. Such community-level racial inequities in credit scores remain largely unexplained by education, income, employment, and homeownership, potentially suggesting that discriminatory policies could play a role in shaping these differences. Compared with older adults, young adults may also be experiencing more financial distress, especially after 2021; and compared with similar peers in 2016, pandemic-era young adults experience more rapid gains in credit health, especially in the first year of the pandemic. Importantly, this study’s inferences on race and ethnicity are only applicable at the community-level; do not apply to all young adults, just those with a credit record; and may not be transferable to other economic contexts and populations. Also, the data used for the dissertation do not include individual race or ethnicity data, but instead reflect the racial and ethnic composition of the residence area. Despite these limitations, this dissertation uses recent administrative data to provide key insights on: (1) the credit health outcomes of young adults post-recession, (2) heterogeneity in young adults’ credit and debt trajectories across communities, and (3) post-recession financial well-being trends in a new economic context. Overall, these findings suggest pathways for future research to explore the mechanisms underpinning these trends, disentangle individual and community effects, assess trajectories of non-credit financial well-being outcomes post-recession, and compare insights to trends observed in other economic downturns.
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Martinchek_gwu_0075A_16727.pdf | 2024-10-02 | Open Access |
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